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We looked at 1,000 landing pages. These are the top 5 design trends we found.

4 min read

The results are in, and the top landing pages are heavy on content and light on color. At Crayon, we recently analyzed the top 1,000+ landing pages from our web design inspiration site Crayon Inspire. We looked at how they used text, video, and colors, and we even dug into the structure of the most popular landing pages of the last year.

What did we find? There’s still a lot of room to be bold in the world of landing page design.

If you’re designing a landing page, these are the top 5 trends you need to know:

Content marketing is bigger than ever—and that extends to content on landing pages themselves. The average word count landed at 2,106 words, the length of a meaty blog post! Whether it’s the SEO strategy or conversion tests driving this, one thing is clear: landing pages need to account for more text content.

But marketers keep landing page content short and sweet when it matters. There was a pocket of very short landing pages: 45% of signup pages had fewer than 500 words. Transactional pages like on Spotify’s website or Moz’s trial may want to cut down on distractions and focus on completing the signup process. Perhaps the “selling” of the signup needs to happen on a separate page before landing on the conversion form.

Only a few companies are experimenting with video on landing pages. 14% of landing pages included a video, leaving a lot of room for companies to experiment more with multimedia. One of the key challenges with including any interactive content is complementing rather than distracting the conversion flow on the page.

Websites still love neutral colors.41% of landing pages primarily used black or grey, and 35% chose the classic blue/green web color scheme. This could mean that companies see better conversion rates when they use neutral colors. Or this could show that there’s a lot of opportunity to use bold designs to differentiate and brand a company’s offerings.

Landing page design testing should be a consistent, ongoing effort, but it rarely is. Over the course of the last year, only 11% of the pages were redesigned. But it’s through testing new designs, content, and more that marketers can get better results from their landing pages.

“The top landing pages are heavy on content and light on color.”

At the end of the day, the trends from these top landing pages show that there is still a lot of room for new tests, bold designs, and integrating more and varied content. Check out the landing page report highlights over on Crayon’s blog or download the full report to dig into more of the trends.

Got any tips for successful landing page design?

Ellie Mirman is CMO at Crayon, the market and competitive intelligence company that provides strategic insights and inspiration for marketers. Prior to Crayon, she was VP Marketing at Toast, where she built and led the marketing function across demand gen, content marketing, product marketing, branding, and customer advocacy. Previously, she held multiple marketing leadership positions at HubSpot during its growth from 100 customers to IPO.